light, but I couldn't get a word in edgeways.
If anything, he was over-explanatory, but I pardoned him, for I
realised that the poor man's life must be spent in explaining himself
to unbelievers. I disliked his tacit classing of me with the infidel,
and I indignantly took the side of the infidel and asked him questions.
Then he gave me of his best.

He is a great man. I don't think he has any theoretical knowledge, and
I believe that anyone could trip him up over Freud or Jung, Montessori
or Froebel, Dewey or Homer Lane; but the man seems to know it all by
instinct or intuition. To him creation is everything. I was half
afraid that he might have the typical crank's belief in imposing his
taste on the pupils, and I mentioned my doubt.

"No," he said, "we have a gramophone with fox-trots, ragtimes,
Beethoven and Melba, and the children nearly always choose the best
records."

Love of beauty is a real thing in this school. The playground is full
of bonny corners with flowers and bushes. The school writing books are
bound in artistic wallpaper by the children, and hand-made frames
enclose reproductions of good pictures on the walls.

I saw no corporate teaching, and I should have asked O'Neill if he had
any. If he hasn't I think he is wrong, for the other way--the
learn-by-doing individual way--starves the group spirit. The
class-teaching system has many faults, and O'Neill seems to have
abolished spoon-feeding, but the class has one merit--it is a crowd.
Each child measures himself against the others, not necessarily in
competition. Perhaps it is the psychological effect of having an
audience that I am trying to praise. Yes, that is it: the
individual-work way is like a rehearsal of a play to empty seats; the
class-way is like a performance before a crowded house. It is a
projection of one's ego outward.

"This method," said O'Neill, "may be out-of-date in a month."

I think highly of him for these words alone. He has no fixed beliefs
about methods of study; he himself learns by doing, and to-morrow will
be cheerfully willing to scrap the method he is using to-day. If the
ideal teacher is the man who is always learning, then O'Neill comes
pretty near that ideal. I wish that every teacher in Britain could see
his school.

The big problem for the heretical teacher is the problem of order, or
rather of disorder. When a child is free from authority, he usually
leaves his path untidy; he leaves his chise